82 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



son with the bryony, yet it manages to ramble through 

 the tallest hedge and take the best of the sun for the 

 ripening of its egg-shaped fruit. When needs must, 

 it will grow into a tolerable bush, but it very much 

 prefers to lean and scramble on others. The hop can 

 only wind from left to right, the bean only from right 

 to left, but this arab of the bush is Jack of both twists 

 though master of neither. It is without tendrils or 

 leaves that can hold on, yet few flowers are more 

 common than its poisonous-looking, potato-like blos- 

 soms. Higher in the scale of extempore climbers is 

 the traveller's-joy, now sprouting from its high woody 

 tangles for fresh excursions through our English 

 jungles. Either leaf of any of its pairs can curl its 

 stalk round a twig. The thrill of the touch is com- 

 municated throughout the fathoms of wiry, dead-look- 

 ing stem, and the community generously supplies the 

 self-appointed grabber for empire with extra nourish- 

 ment. The leaf-stalk swells and toughens as it strains 

 to its new task, and is granted as its guerdon the 

 immortality that belongs to a branch, for when in 

 autumn the other leaves fall off, our friend who has 

 grasped something remains at his post. The depen- 

 dent life, after all, is a strenuous life. Of all woody 

 plants the honeysuckle is the first in leaf. The battle 

 among the groundlings is now almost at its height, 

 while the lordly self-supporting trees that fought their 

 war long ago as saplings or seedlings among the 

 lilliputian grass open the leaves of their maturity very 

 much at their leisure. Theirs is only the civil strife 

 of leaf against leaf, and as the spoils in any case belong 

 to the community, it is comparatively indifferent as to 

 the period that the war shall cover. 



